In a note to his chapter on the Industrial History of Rationalism, Mr. Lecky charges St. Thomas with what is nothing less than moral obliquity. The Duchess of Brabant, he says, had a scruple of conscience about tolerating the Jews. She therefore consulted St. Thomas; "who replied, among other things that the Jews were doomed to perpetual servitude, and that all their property being derived from usury might lawfully be taken from them." Mr. Lecky is inaccurate both as to the confiscation of their property and as to the perpetual servitude. St. Thomas does not say that all their property was derived from usury, and it would, indeed, have been rather a rash judgment in him to say so. But the Duchess of Brabant had apparently desired to impose new burdens on the Jews, and in writing to St. Thomas had stated that all their property seemed to be derived from usury; to which he replied, that if this were so, they might lawfully be compelled to make restitution. Nor does this by any means imply that all their property was to be taken away from them, as appears from St. Thomas's letter among his opuscula, [Footnote 25] and from his general doctrine respecting restitution. [Footnote 26] With respect to the perpetual servitude what St. Thomas does say is this: "Although according to the laws the Jews be, or were, through their own fault doomed to perpetual servitude, and thus princes could appropriate their possessions as their own, yet this is to be understood leniently, so that the necessaries of life be by no means taken from them. But since we ought, as the apostle declares, to walk honestly in the sight of those who are without, of Jews and Gentiles, and the Church of God, as the laws declare, compulsory service is not to be required of them, which they were not wont to perform in time past." He goes on to say that if ill-gotten goods were taken from the Jews, it would be unlawful for her to retain them, but they would have to be restored to those from whom they had been unjustly taken; and even under these conditions he declines to sanction any proceeding against them, but only "si nihil aliud obsistat." Mr. Lecky also quotes, he says, the Histriones of St. Thomas. What the Histriones of St. Thomas are, we have not, we confess, the most remote idea.
[Footnote 25: Opusc. xxii, in calce Opusculi de Regimine Principum.]
[Footnote 26: Summa, 2, 2, q. 61-62, etc.]
Mr. Lecky professes to give the analyses of various theological beliefs and tones of thought which have prevailed in other times. Of these, however, he has had but little or no practical experience. He consequently puts before us only certain restricted points of view, which have strongly impressed themselves on his mind in the course of his studies and meditations. We are hurried along by his words as by a flood; but while the effects which some particular doctrine possibly might produce if it were held alone are vividly set before us, he totally loses sight of those other doctrines, which were organically connected with it, and modified and regulated its action. To evade one difficulty be falls into another: he concentrates his gaze on a point that he may see more clearly; but, confining it there, loses sight of those harmonies and contrasts, which make up the beauty of the whole. In one direction this defect has had very great influence. "Veritas" is, it is said, "in medio;" the present age has gone wrong all on one side; and Mr. Lecky, who is an advanced disciple of the present age, consequently considers that preceding ages have gone wrong all on the other. He sees that there is a very great difficulty in adequately realizing phases of thought so very different from those which now prevail. And, because of this, he expends his strength on the points of difference, neglecting for their sake things nearer to his apprehension; and the very natural consequence is that he gives us a distorted and exaggerated picture in which the common elements are not sufficiently brought out.
An instance of this occurs in his treatment of the subject of eternal punishment. The general organization and want of order which pervades his work is quite insufficient to account for the pertinacity with which he again and again recurs to the subject. Like the whole anti-Christian party, and very naturally, he detests the doctrine with his whole spirit; and he allows this detestation to color his whole views of the middle ages. He attributes to its influence whatever he finds, or imagines himself to have found, of a hard, cruel, and repulsive character in their theory and practice. He begins by misrepresenting the character of the doctrine itself. He separates it from the conditioning doctrines which were taught along with it, and which regulated and directed its influence. He dwells almost entirely on the terrible side of the then existing Christianity, and almost altogether neglects the operation of the concurring principle of love, the opposite pole of the Christian motives. And then he concludes that to its influence was due the severity of punishments in the middle ages. A universal terrorism was produced. The sense of the divine mercy was destroyed. The sufferings of the lost were at first regarded with horror; but as men became more used to the thing, the horror was changed to indifference, and the indifference to a barbarous delight in the contemplation and even the infliction of pain. It will not require many arguments to show that such a method of treatment is monstrous. Mr. Lecky ought to have noticed that the causes which in the middle ages led to peculiar stress being laid on the doctrine of eternal punishment, were causes external to, and mostly in direct opposition, to the church; and that their tendency was met by a corresponding realization of an opposite pole of Christian feeling.
We cannot better introduce what we have to say on the severity of punishments, and the alleged callousness of disposition in mediaeval times, and, indeed, on Mr. Lecky's whole criticism of the subject of eternal punishment, than by a passage from a most able writer:
"One of the effects of civilization (not to say one of the ingredients in it) is, that the spectacle, and even the very idea, of pain, is kept more and more out of sight of those classes who enjoy in their full the benefits of civilization. The state of perpetual personal conflict, rendered necessary by the circumstances of former times, and from which it was hardly possible for any person, in whatever rank of society, to be exempt, necessarily habituated everyone to the spectacle of harshness, rudeness, and violence, to the struggle of one indomitable will against another, and to the alternate suffering and infliction of pain. These things, consequently, were not as revolting even to the best and most actively benevolent men of former days, as they are to our own; and we find the recorded conduct of those men frequently such as would be universally considered very unfeeling in a person of our own day. They, however, thought less of the infliction of pain, because they thought less of pain altogether. When we read of actions of the Greeks and Romans, or of our own ancestors, denoting callousness to human suffering, we must not think that those who committed these actions were as cruel as we must become before we could do the like. The pain which they inflicted, they were in the habit of voluntarily undergoing from slight causes; it did not appear to them as great an evil as it appears, and as it really is, to us, nor did it in any way degrade their minds." [Footnote 27]
[Footnote 27: J.S. Mill, Dissertations and Discussions; Art Civilization.]
The scale, in fact, according to which degrees of pain were computed, was much less minute then than now. This arose from the imperfect subdivision of labor in society, and the consequently more frequently recurring necessity of personally putting forth powers of endurance and of action; from the continual wars and commotions; from the imperfection of the mechanical appliances which now alleviate suffering; from a sterner and rougher manner of living, necessitated by the undeveloped state of the social arts; from the intimate intermingling of the civil and the military life, arising out of the feudal system; and from a multitude of other causes. To these, however, we must add another of far more potent influence. The inchoate mediaeval nations were only emerging from a state of barbarism; and the associations of that barbarism still tenaciously clung to them in the gloomy superstitions common among northern nations, in cruel ordeals, in internecine warfare, in the whole texture of their social and national traditions. The causes referred to by Mr. Mill were in operation almost as much in the civilization of Greece and Rome as in the middle ages; but this circumstance, which is one on which we need not dilate, increased, and must have increased, to an enormous extent the activity of the tendencies on which be remarks. If indeed, there were two nations exactly alike in every particular, except that the one believed eternal punishment and set small store by pain, so as severely and even barbarously to punish offenses, while the other did neither of these things—we should in that case plausibly assert a direct causal connexion between holding the eternity of future punishment and a hardness and callousness of temper. But we cannot argue in this free and easy manner, where the instances from which we have to make our induction are so multifariously different as are the social condition of the present day and the social condition of mediaeval times. We must not thus arbitrarily single one from out of a multitude of causes. Reasoning from the known principles of human nature, we can say with all confidence that the causes just enumerated must have operated, and operated very powerfully, to produce many and severe punishments, the carelessness for and of suffering, the trials by ordeal and by torture, which existed at the period of which we write. And thus we also see that those representations of the torments of the lost, on which Mr. Lecky expends such a vast amount of rhetoric, must have produced these effects immeasurably less than they would now produce; far more powerful means had to be resorted to then to produce an amount of feeling for which gentler methods now suffice.